The Ayyubid Army and Saladin's Campaigns: Hattin, Jerusalem, and the Crusades
- Mehmet Özdemir
- May 24
- 9 min read
No Kurdish commander in history has matched the military achievements of Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub — known to the Western world as Saladin. In a single campaign season in 1187, he destroyed the Crusader field army at Hattin, recaptured Jerusalem, and swept through nearly every Crusader stronghold in the Levant. Within five years, he had fought the Third Crusade to a standstill against Richard I of England and secured Muslim control over Jerusalem for the next eight centuries.
The Ayyubid military machine was built on Kurdish tribal warriors, Turkic cavalry, Arab infantry, and a strategic doctrine that combined patience, mobility, and the exploitation of Crusader weaknesses. This article covers the major campaigns and battles of the Ayyubid era — from the Kurdish conquest of Egypt to the Mongol destruction of the last Ayyubid strongholds.
Contents
The Conquest of Egypt (1164–1171)
The Ayyubid rise began not in Kurdistan but in Egypt. Between 1164 and 1169, the Zangid atabeg Nur ad-Din dispatched three military expeditions to Egypt, led by his Kurdish general Shirkuh and accompanied by Shirkuh's nephew, the young Saladin. Egypt under the Fatimid Caliphate was collapsing, and both the Crusaders and the Zangids competed to control its vast wealth.
The first two expeditions (1164 and 1167) involved complex three-way fighting between Zangid forces, Crusader armies from Jerusalem, and Fatimid factions. Shirkuh demonstrated brilliant tactical flexibility, using rapid marches through the Sinai and the Nile Delta to outmanoeuvre both enemies. In 1169, Shirkuh's third expedition succeeded: he was appointed vizier of Egypt. When Shirkuh died just two months later, Saladin — then only thirty-one — inherited the position.
In 1171, Saladin abolished the Fatimid Caliphate entirely, ending two centuries of Shia rule in Egypt and returning the country to Sunni allegiance under the Abbasid Caliph. This was a military coup backed by Kurdish and Turkic troops loyal to Saladin personally. Egypt's enormous wealth — its grain, its gold, its strategic position between Africa and Asia — now belonged to a Kurdish dynasty. It would fund every subsequent Ayyubid campaign.
Unification Wars and Early Crusader Clashes (1175–1179)
Before Saladin could confront the Crusaders, he first had to unify the Muslim world behind him. After Nur ad-Din's death in 1174, Saladin fought a series of wars against rival Zangid princes to seize Damascus, Homs, Aleppo, and eventually Mosul. At the Battle of the Horns of Hama in 1175, Saladin defeated a Zangid coalition army, establishing his supremacy over Syria.
Saladin's early Crusader engagements were not all victories. At the Battle of Montgisard in 1177, the leper king Baldwin IV of Jerusalem caught Saladin's army off guard and inflicted a devastating defeat, routing the Ayyubid forces with a surprise cavalry charge. Saladin barely escaped. The defeat taught him a critical lesson: never underestimate Crusader heavy cavalry in a direct charge.
Saladin recovered quickly. At the Battle of Marj Ayyun in 1179, his forces ambushed and destroyed a Crusader force, capturing several prominent knights. Later that year, he besieged and destroyed the Crusader fortress at Jacob's Ford on the Jordan River — a strategic position that had threatened Muslim communications between Damascus and Egypt. By 1180, the military balance between the Ayyubids and the Crusader states had shifted decisively in Saladin's favour.
The Battle of Hattin (1187)
The Battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187 was the most important battle of the Crusades and one of the most decisive engagements in medieval military history. Saladin assembled the largest army he had ever commanded — over thirty thousand troops including Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen, and Druze contingents — and crossed the Jordan River to besiege Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee.
King Guy de Lusignan of Jerusalem took the bait and marched his army of roughly twenty thousand men — including the elite Templar and Hospitaller knights — eastward toward Tiberias on 3 July. Saladin had learned from Montgisard: he avoided direct confrontation and relied instead on a strategy of exhaustion. His horse archers harassed the Crusader column throughout the march across waterless terrain in the scorching July heat.
By evening the Crusaders were forced to halt on the plateau near the Horns of Hattin, two steep hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee. They were cut off from water, exhausted, and surrounded. On the morning of 4 July, Saladin ordered his troops to set fire to the dry grass surrounding the Crusader camp, choking them with smoke while his archers maintained a constant barrage. The Crusader infantry broke and retreated up the slopes of the Horns. The cavalry launched several desperate charges but could not break through.
The result was annihilation. Over ten thousand Crusaders surrendered. The relic of the True Cross was captured. King Guy and most of the Christian lords were taken prisoner. Saladin personally executed Reginald of Châtillon, who had broken a truce, and ordered the execution of virtually all captured Templars and Hospitallers. Only the Count of Tripoli's contingent managed to break through and escape. The Crusader field army — the military backbone of the Kingdom of Jerusalem — had ceased to exist in a single day.
The Siege of Jerusalem (1187)
With the Crusader army destroyed, Saladin swept through the Levant with extraordinary speed. Acre, Jaffa, Sidon, Beirut, and dozens of other towns and castles fell in rapid succession. By September 1187, Saladin's army stood before the walls of Jerusalem — the city that had been in Crusader hands since the First Crusade captured it in 1099.
The siege lasted from 20 September to 2 October 1187. Balian of Ibelin, commanding the city's defence with almost no professional soldiers, negotiated a surrender after Ayyubid sappers breached a section of the wall. Saladin agreed to ransom the Christian population rather than massacre them — a striking contrast to the bloodbath the First Crusaders had inflicted when they took the city in 1099. The fall of Jerusalem shocked Christendom and triggered the Third Crusade.
The Third Crusade: Acre, Arsuf, and Jaffa (1189–1192)
The Third Crusade (1189–1192) brought the most formidable European army of the era to the Levant, led by Richard I of England, Philip II of France, and Frederick Barbarossa of the Holy Roman Empire. Barbarossa drowned en route, but Richard and Philip arrived with massive forces.
The Siege of Acre (1189–1191) was a gruelling two-year operation in which the Crusaders besieged the Ayyubid garrison while Saladin's field army besieged the besiegers. The Crusaders eventually took Acre in July 1191 after Richard's arrival tipped the balance, but at enormous cost to both sides.
At the Battle of Arsuf on 7 September 1191, Richard I defeated Saladin in a pitched battle by maintaining disciplined infantry formations that absorbed the Ayyubid horse-archer harassment before unleashing a devastating cavalry counter-charge. It was a tactical defeat for Saladin, but not a strategic one — he preserved his army and continued to contest Richard's advance.
The final major engagement was the Battle of Jaffa in August 1192, where Richard personally led a counter-attack that saved the Crusader garrison. Despite Richard's tactical brilliance, Saladin's strategic position held: Jerusalem remained under Muslim control. The Treaty of Jaffa (September 1192) ended the Third Crusade with the Crusaders retaining a narrow coastal strip but failing to recapture Jerusalem. Saladin had achieved his strategic objective.
The Later Ayyubid Wars (1218–1250)
After Saladin's death in 1193, the Ayyubid empire fragmented among his heirs but remained the dominant military power in the region. The Fifth Crusade (1218–1221) targeted Egypt directly, besieging the port of Damietta. The Crusaders captured it in 1219 after a prolonged siege, but when they advanced toward Cairo in 1221, the Ayyubids under al-Kamil used the annual Nile flooding to trap and destroy the Crusader army — a masterful use of terrain and timing.
At the Battle of La Forbie in 1244, an Ayyubid-Khwarazmian alliance crushed a combined Crusader-Syrian coalition in one of the bloodiest battles of the Crusading era. The Crusader losses were comparable to Hattin. The Seventh Crusade (1249–1250) saw Louis IX of France invade Egypt. The Crusaders took Damietta again, but at the Battle of Mansurah in February 1250, the Ayyubid-Mamluk forces — led by the Mamluk commander Baybars — destroyed the Crusader advance guard and eventually captured King Louis himself.
The Fall of the Ayyubid Empire
The Battle of Mansurah in 1250 was the last great Ayyubid victory — and it was won largely by Mamluk slave-soldiers, not the Ayyubid dynasty itself. Within months of the battle, the Mamluks seized power in Egypt, ending Ayyubid rule there. The Kurdish dynasty that Saladin had founded was overthrown by its own military elite.
Ayyubid princes continued to rule parts of Syria, but they were increasingly marginalised. The final blow came from the Mongols. In 1259–1260, the Mongol army besieged and captured Mayyafariqin — the same city that had been the Marwanid capital two centuries earlier — in a brutal siege that destroyed the last major Ayyubid stronghold. The massacre that followed was one of the bloodiest events of the Mongol invasions.
The Ayyubid military legacy is immense. They demonstrated that Kurdish commanders could build and sustain a multi-ethnic imperial army, wage war across multiple theatres simultaneously, and compete with the most powerful military forces of their era. The strategic principles Saladin developed — patience, mobility, attrition, and the exploitation of enemy divisions — remain studied in military academies to this day.
Timeline
1164–1169 — Shirkuh and Saladin lead three military expeditions to Egypt under Zangid command.
1171 — Saladin abolishes the Fatimid Caliphate. Ayyubid control of Egypt established.
1175 — Battle of the Horns of Hama. Saladin defeats Zangid rivals.
1177 — Battle of Montgisard. Baldwin IV defeats Saladin.
1179 — Battle of Marj Ayyun and destruction of Jacob's Ford.
4 July 1187 — Battle of Hattin. Crusader army destroyed.
2 October 1187 — Siege of Jerusalem ends. Saladin recaptures the city.
1187 — Siege of Tyre. Saladin fails to take the city — his only major setback.
1189–1191 — Siege of Acre. Two-year battle; Crusaders prevail.
7 September 1191 — Battle of Arsuf. Richard I defeats Saladin.
August 1192 — Battle of Jaffa. Final major Third Crusade engagement.
September 1192 — Treaty of Jaffa. Jerusalem remains under Muslim control.
1218–1221 — Fifth Crusade. Ayyubids use Nile flooding to destroy Crusader army.
1244 — Battle of La Forbie. Ayyubid-Khwarazmian victory over Crusaders.
February 1250 — Battle of Mansurah. Crusader defeat; Louis IX captured.
1250 — Mamluks seize power in Egypt. End of Ayyubid rule.
1259–1260 — Siege of Mayyafariqin. Mongols destroy last major Ayyubid stronghold.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Saladin Kurdish?
Yes. Saladin was born into the Rawadiya Kurdish tribe in Tikrit in 1137 CE. His family originated from the town of Dvin in Armenia — the same city where the Shaddadid dynasty had been founded two centuries earlier. His uncle Shirkuh and his father Ayyub were Kurdish military commanders serving the Zangid dynasty. Saladin's Kurdish origins are universally acknowledged by medieval and modern historians.
What happened at the Battle of Hattin?
On 4 July 1187, Saladin's army of over thirty thousand men destroyed the Crusader army of approximately twenty thousand near the Horns of Hattin in northern Palestine. Saladin used a strategy of exhaustion — cutting the Crusaders off from water, harassing them with horse archers, and setting fire to the surrounding grassland. King Guy of Jerusalem was captured along with most of the Crusader nobility. The battle effectively ended the Kingdom of Jerusalem as a military power and led directly to the Muslim recapture of Jerusalem.
Did Saladin ever lose a battle?
Yes. Saladin suffered several significant defeats. At the Battle of Montgisard in 1177, Baldwin IV of Jerusalem routed Saladin's army with a surprise cavalry charge, and Saladin barely escaped. At the Battle of Arsuf in 1191, Richard I of England defeated him through disciplined combined-arms tactics. Saladin also failed to capture the city of Tyre in 1187, which became the base from which the Third Crusade was launched. However, Saladin's strategic genius lay in recovering from defeats and maintaining his strategic objectives despite tactical setbacks.
How did Saladin recapture Jerusalem?
After destroying the Crusader army at Hattin, Saladin besieged Jerusalem from 20 September to 2 October 1187. With almost no professional soldiers left to defend it, the city negotiated a surrender. Saladin agreed to ransom the Christian population rather than massacre them, earning a reputation for chivalry that impressed even his European enemies. Jerusalem would remain under Muslim control for the next eight centuries, with only a brief interlude during the Sixth Crusade.
What was the composition of the Ayyubid army?
The Ayyubid army was a multi-ethnic force built around Kurdish tribal cavalry, Turkic ghulam (slave-soldier) heavy cavalry, Arab infantry, and later Mamluk elite units. Kurdish warriors from Saladin's own tribal network formed the political core of the army, but the bulk of the combat power came from professional Turkic cavalry and mounted archers. The army also included Druze, Bedouin, and other auxiliary contingents. This diverse composition gave the Ayyubids tactical flexibility but also created internal tensions that eventually led to the Mamluk takeover.
How did the Ayyubid dynasty end?
The Ayyubid dynasty lost Egypt in 1250 when the Mamluk military elite seized power after the Battle of Mansurah. Ayyubid princes continued ruling parts of Syria for a few more years, but the Mongol invasions of the 1250s and 1260s destroyed the remaining Ayyubid strongholds. The siege of Mayyafariqin (1259–1260) by Mongol forces ended with a brutal massacre and marked the effective end of the Ayyubid dynasty as a political and military force.
References
Lyons, M. C. and Jackson, D. E. P., Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War, Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Runciman, Steven, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols., Cambridge University Press, 1951–1954.
Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin (contemporary biography).
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